Election Big Newshttp://www.greenwichtime.com/elections/collectionRss/Election-Big-News-7016.php
Who are the people counting the ballots? ]]>http://www.greenwichtime.com/local/article/Just-who-are-the-people-counting-the-ballots-860614.php
article860614
For the dozens of volunteers inside City Hall Annex last week, pouring through Bridgeport's ballots offered a rare glimpse under Election Day's usually tightly clamped hood. The innards they encountered were particularly complex given Bridgeport's bungled election last month, when a shortage of ballots forced city officials to send photocopies to every polling station; when poll workers toiled nearly to Wednesday's sunup hand-counting the photocopied ballots; when head moderators needed three days to untangle all the tallies and file official results with Hartford. When the city agreed to allow the Connecticut Post and a group of good government groups to recount the gubernatorial race just before Thanksgiving, the volunteer counters started signing up. Most of them are members of the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition, which joins the League of Women Voters in Connecticut, Common Cause, CTVoters.org and Connecticut Citizen Action Group. Many of them have spent the past three years observing the state's post-election audits, which only scrutinize ballots that are read by optical scanning machines. During breaks, the counters often spoke of performing a civic duty: "If your vote doesn't count," said David Anderson, "then does anything else matter?" At times though, they were so swamped in voting sheets that the civic duty seemed not so much about mastering the election medium as fighting through the election tedium. Others, like Laura Axthelm of Westport, were busy reading through voter check-in lists -- those thick stacks of stapled pages that list residents by street and alphabetically -- to make sure that everyone who checked in as having voted had their ballots counted in the results. The second one says `My vote counts.'" Pounding her fist on the table, she added: "That's what we're doing here. Opening the next packet, this one for Black Rock School, Axthelm asked, "Should we mix it up and do the absentee ballots first?" [...] when his team ]]>
Sat, 4 Dec 2010 22:53:00 UThttp://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/Recount-of-Bridgeport-ballots-under-way-840037.php
article840037
The private recount of the city's Nov. 2 gubernatorial election started at a trot Monday, as volunteer counters honed their procedures and succeeded in tallying ballots from four of Bridgeport's 25 voting districts. The pace of the recount, which will resume Tuesday at 9 a.m., is expected to quicken, as a team of counters devotes itself to processing the city's final moderator reports, which indicate how many votes each candidate received from each voting district, while the remaining counters keep churning through bags of ballots. The recount is being done because of questions arising from Election Day problems in Bridgeport, when most of the city's 25 districts ran out of ballots, leaving in doubt the outcome of the hotly contested race for governor, in which Democrat Dannel Malloy narrowly defeated Republican Tom Foley. [...] the city's two registrars of voters, Democrat Santa Ayala and Republican Joseph Borges, had to select which bags to load onto a push cart in McLevy Hall and trundle across the street to the City Hall Annex, where the recount -- coordinated by the Connecticut Post and four civic groups -- is taking place. The fact that the station went through more than 100 photocopied ballots, which weren't included in the bag and appeared to be missing, caused some early questioning from Republican lawyers present and members of the media. [...] long as the tiniest smudge of ink appeared inside the bubble, the vote was listed as a "questionable ballot" -- meaning counters are not sure the machine actually read it -- while if the ink missed the bubble completely, as it did in some cases, the ballot was listed as a "no vote" because Luther Weeks, head of the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition, who is directing the tallying, believed the machine could not have counted it. ]]>
Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:36:00 UThttp://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/Day-two-No-numbers-yet-but-progress-continues-849023.php
article849023
Recount workers poured through five more of the city's 25 voting districts Tuesday, bringing their two-day total for recanvassed districts in Bridgeport's gubernatorial race to nine. Two workers pulled data from the city's moderator returns, which describe how many votes candidates received at each polling district, while another pair scrutinized the voter check-in lists from each precinct. [...] the recount has produced tentative numbers for those nine voting districts. [...] it has remained unclear how many total photocopied ballots were cast and how many of them were cast at each polling district, as well as what irregularities moderators listed in their Election Day journals. The youngest counter on the team, a recent college graduate, started flipping through the next stack, reading off which party received each vote. ]]>
Wed, 1 Dec 2010 14:21:00 UThttp://www.greenwichtime.com/local/article/Day-Three-Recount-chugs-on-in-Bridgeport-852008.php
article852008
Recount workers tallied ballots from seven more of this city's 25 voting districts Wednesday, moving their three-day total for the Bridgeport gubernatorial recount to 15 districts. While state-mandated, post-election day recounts assess only the accuracy of optical-scanning machines, the current recount will measure how effectively moderators tallied thousands of photocopied ballots that went to polling stations once the original ballots started running out that Tuesday morning. [...] the atmosphere in which they're toiling is far removed from the mania inside McLevy Hall one month ago, when campaign representatives, city officials and members of the media were cramming inside, often spilling into the hallway, craning their necks for clues as to how the process was going. ]]>
Thu, 2 Dec 2010 03:41:00 UThttp://www.greenwichtime.com/local/article/End-in-sight-as-Bridgeport-recount-breaks-for-the-859074.php
article859074
[...] they'll return to City Hall Annex on the eighth, Monday morning, and pick up where they left off -- tallying ballots from this city's 25th and final voting district, comparing their numbers with the ones sent to Hartford last month and allowing city officials one final crack at finding errors in the recount process. "[...] first we're going to go over it all with the city and see if there's anything they're not satisfied with," explained Luther Weeks, executive director of the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition, which is co-sponsoring the recount of Bridgeport's gubernatorial race along with the Connecticut Post. The recount was undertaken after a shortage of ballots on Nov. 2 left Bridgeport election workers having to hand-count photocopied ballots and delayed reporting the city's final tally until Nov. 5. The recount does not affect the outcome of the race, but city officials and good government groups have supported the effort, saying it will bring some clarity to Bridgeport's muddled results. [...] Weeks and his assistant, Cheryl Dunson, president of the League of Women Voters of Connecticut, checked that their master tally sheet -- which shows the district's total results, broken down into the number of machine-read ballots and hand-counted ballots -- matched perfectly the half-dozen or so working tally sheets that were affixed to each stack of 50 photocopied ballots. ]]>
Sat, 4 Dec 2010 02:44:11 UT